Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Russell Brown,
As I said here last night (and on Pat Brittenden's Rhema show this morning), it was a useful and pleasant experience to talk with decent, articulate people when so much of my focus on Christianity tends to be going WTF? at lunatic American evangelists and their local analogues.
Living in America has been quite useful for ironing out my internal "X is religious? But they seemed so *normal*!" response. It hasn't gone away, exactly, but I'm learning to not assume that being non-religious as the default until told otherwise.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Lilith __,
This Heathen Manifesto is interesting.
I'm not taken with the use of the word "heathen" - historically it describes people of the wrong religion, rather than no religion, and it centres that description on the "right" religion - but there are some nice points in there. (Although the "scientism" bit...eh.)
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Ross Mason,
But I can’t help think that we have a moral obligation to assist in the education of these people to try and appeal to their sense of (il)logic and and persuade them they are wasting their time and resources. It goes two ways.
Well, they, in many cases, believe they have a strong moral obligation to save you from eternal damnation. It goes, as you say, two ways. Unless someone specifically wants to have that conversation or there is a very specific harm being done, it's better for everyone if it doesn't go at all.
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Field Theory: Fight Club, in reply to Andrew Stevenson,
Its about twice as long as his other books and is not 'poop science' by any means, but if you want to look at the social and psycological details involved its a fascinating read.
Some of his numbers are right dodgy, especially involving large-scale warfare in pre-modern periods. But certainly on an everyday, societal level, his thesis seems to basically hold. Violence up to and including murder as a dispute resolution process has practically dropped off the radar in most modern societies. The problem is how quickly it re-emerges when given the opportunity.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Sacha,
like Parliament
Quite.
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Then he called me a faggot. I turned and told him to fuck himself. Then he made a comment about my mother. I walked back; it was, in the mildest sense, on.
That's the only part I don't personally get; getting angry, definitely, telling them to do something anatomically improbable, been there, going back to exchange some more insults...nah. Always seems like a total waste of time.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Scott Chris,
Materialist? As in “This material world that we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell is all there is”?
It also occurs that the other problem with that definition is that there is decidedly more to the physical world than humans can sense. In the spectrum of signals out there, our sight (and hearing, and smell, and so forth) covers but a tiny fraction. We can come up with ways to detect those signals that translate into our senses, but that's just a translation.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Russell Brown,
The evidence is certainly not encouraging. On the other hand, it didn't hurt you or me that other people did this thing.
The only time prayer is a problem is if it's used to be exclusionary (official prayers in inappropriate settings) or if it's substituted for effective action (children in need of medical treatment, etc.) Otherwise it is, frankly, not anyone else's business to be bothered about.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yes you can always argue that the alternatives exist for specific conditions, and sometimes they really do, but as I said before such arguments tend spiral down in ever decreasing circles.
That's the real problem with, quote, intelligent design, unquote. It's pretty fucking unintelligent, when you get down to the details.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
We, shock horror, look at our plants!!!!
You can’t do that with a computer? I’m disappointed.
Traditional knowledges contain wisdom that could temper some of the worst excesses of scientific hubris.
Honestly, I think you'll find that scientists who study nature are some of the people most willing to acknowledge our limits. (C.f. geologists, when consulted on humanity's habit of building in floodplains and on major fault zones.) They're the people who are running up against them all the time.